Inaugural Address. On the antiquity of man, and the discovery of fossil mammalia in Devonshire and Scotland

Abstract

One of the most interesting provinces of geology is that which records the history of fossil mammalia. To the general public no department of our science, or, may I say, of any science? is so interesting or important as this, for the question of the antiquity of Man is of course included in such researches. Need I add that so attractive a field of inquiry has found many distinguished occupants from the days when, in 1825, Dr Buckland picked up a rhinoceros tooth and a flint blade in Kent’s Cavern, near Torquay, to these later times, when we stand in the full light of the researches and discoveries of Lyell, Evans, Lubbock, Prestwich, Pengelly, and many more. During last session we had a most admirable description by Mr James Simpson and Mr John Henderson of mammalian remains discovered by Mr Macfie of Dreghorn in a rock fissure on his estate near Edinburgh. These remains consisted of bones of the horse, wolf, and fox, but the greater number were those of the reindeer, the bones being gnawed and split up in a manner suggestive of the hyaena. Now, the very fact that such a ‶find″ as this proved that in our own neighbourhood such animals as the reindeer and wolf, and probably also the hyaena, once dwelt, was sufficient to arrest attention, the more so that such animals have long been extinct in Britain. Of course we accept the conclusion that, under climatic conditions very different to those with which this